Saturday, November 14, 2009

ARTstor's Offline Image Viewer

ARTstor has just released an updated version of the Offline Image Viewer (OIV) for Macs, which is compatible with the new Snow Leopard operating system.  If you are not familiar with ARTstor's OIV, it is a very nice piece of (free) software that allows ARTstor users to present high-resolution images from ARTstor's digital library in combination with personal images.  Akin to PowerPoint, the OIV is a more streamlined program intended for image presentations specifically.  Once you have imported your images into a presentation, you can choose to share them in a very quick and simple mode by double clicking on the first image in the Image Palette section.  Or you may wish to create authored slides with titles and other text, details, side by side comparisons, etc.  In either mode you can choose to zoom and pan on the fly during presentations.  Image groups downloaded from ARTstor into the OIV travel with their descriptive data, which your can refer to and use in different ways when preparing and presenting the images.  You can also import existing PowerPoint presentations into the OIV.  Of course, if you prefer another presentation tool, such as PowerPoint or Keynote, ARTstor does allow screen-sized downloads of the vast majority of its images.

ARTstor users may download the OIV by registering for a personal account in ARTstor.  When logged in go to Tools > Download offline presentation tool.  If you are downloading the updated version for Macs, please note that ARTstor recommends that you uninstall the previous version before downloading and installing the updated version.

For more information about the OIV, have a look at ARTstor's help section.  The VRC also encourages faculty and students in the Department of Art and Art History to ask us questions anytime.

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